Education is the solution to almost everything. But, how do we make a quality education accessible to all? One solution is to provide free educational software on the internet. This is the vision of Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy.
Afghanistan’s public school system and most Afghan families don’t have computers. Nor can they afford access to the internet. Even if they could, the Khan Academy videos are in English. Solution: Provide translated educational videos and material offline.
Gerard Van Steyn, a TIE volunteer, stepped up to take on this challenge. Gerard, assisted by Will Goldie and Nabi Tawakali, made it possible for TIE to provide computer libraries. TIE now has eight utilized by over six hundred children a day. Whatever videos we produce are being provided to others for free, provided they do the same.
How important could this become? A headmaster of a school in Afghanistan, after reviewing one of our Dari math videos, said “This is better than a teacher. Teachers don’t like to repeat themselves.” A headmaster of another school told Nabi and I,”there are teachers in this school who became teachers because they were someone’s relative.”.
Computer libraries will enable students to learn on their own time and at their own speed. In addition, students will no longer be subject to the limitations of their teachers.
At my request, Gerard wrote a summary of the project:
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Gerard, yet another passionate TIE volunteer.
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It seems like so long ago, and at the same time, just like yesterday. Years ago, I sat down with Budd and Nabi to ask about how to get involved in helping Trust in Education. Research and several discussions later my project evolved into a plan to provide not just better, but a world-class education for the children of Afghanistan!
Many of you may be familiar with Khan Academy (KA) through your children and local schools. KA provides a wide variety of free elementary through college level educational lessons that are so good, students and teachers throughout the world now use them.
It seemed straightforward enough: translate KA lessons into Dari so students throughout Afghanistan, for the first time, can have access to the best in education! The hardest part was finding capable translators. Translating English into Dari is anything but simple. Afghans who are proficient in English and math are very difficult to find and the math videos become increasingly complex.
The good news is that after two years, many substandard translations and continued refinement of the process, we have 1,000 Khan Academy math videos translated into Dari that are downloaded into the computers in TIE’s eight computer libraries. These lessons are being published to the web so anyone (with internet access) can use them. Check it out, and brush up on your Dari while you are at it:
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The official Dari website is now KhanAcademyDari under YouTube.
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We and they have only just begun
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For More Information
Khan Academy produces free world class educational lessons on a wide variety of subjects. KA currently has over 5,000 lessons, from kindergarten through college. www.khanacademy.org I also highly encourage you to watch this entertaining TED talk on child driven learning. It presents intriguing findings on the ability of underprivileged children to quickly and independently learn even very technical subjects in another language.
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Sugata Mitra: The child-driven education
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What’s missing from Gerard’s report is how challenging it has been to be where we are today. Gerard has devoted hundreds of hours to this project. He’s relentless.
This has the potential of becoming the greatest contribution Trust in Education will ever make to education in Afghanistan! Our hope is that we will serve as a catalyst causing others to weigh in. There are thousands of educational videos that need to be translated.